Guess Your Way to Search Competence

December 1, 2011

Let’s assume a person was a middle school teacher, hated it, and started working as a writer at a content management blog. Another hypothetical is a young professional who wanted to make a killing quickly. The first job was commission sales at a software company. The company was acquired and the young professional was assigned to search software sales. After a so-so six months, the person was fired. A small consulting firm needed a person who could talk the talk, make a sale, and go along to get along. Bingo. Search wizard.

Regardless of scenario, certain technical fields seem so darned easy to master. Learn a few words, make some friends who have better than average technical now how, and give a talk or two at a conference. What could be easier than helping clueless companies index their content? How tough could it be?

Well, Time Magazine wants to make this type of faux expertise even easier to master. Point your monitored, filtered browser thing at “Why Guessing Is Undervalued” and get a snoot full of the latest powered baloney from a “real” news magazine. Here’s the key passage in my opinion:

Estimation, this research shows, is not an act of wild speculation but a highly sophisticated and valuable skill that, some experts say, is often given short shrift in the curriculum. “Too much mathematical rigor teaches rigor mortis,” says Sanjoy Mahajan, an associate professor of applied science and engineering at Olin College. Many math textbooks, he notes, “teach how to solve exactly stated problems exactly, whereas life often hands us partly defined problems needing only moderately accurate solutions.”

Hey,guessing is really good. Brain surgery, engineering analysis for air craft engines, and automobile brakes—yep, just guess. Why worry about search technology and retrieval technology or flawed outputs from big data systems? Just guess. Works great.

Stephen E Arnold, December 1, 2011

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.